Is your landlord willing to put in any expense for drainage? Perhaps installing french drains. I can't imagine that fence or posts will last long with all the moisture.

Your dogs are beautiful! I just realized there are 2 in the 2nd picture, I though it had a black jacket on.
They are big dogs so need a place to run and will trample just about anything so whatever you put in...good luck.

I like the chairs. They fill the area in nicely. A huge urn or a tuteur might do the same thing, but I'd stick with chairs. They will look good whether you sit in them or not.

I like the path. I think it should be wider and the stones closer together, though. The more of that nasty clay you can cover with "hardscape" the better, since your plant choices are so limited. Start collecting any kind of rubble you can get your hands on: broken bricks and concrete blocks, small pieces of flagstone, cinderblock cobblestones... broken concrete. You can cobble them all together to make a pretty path. Some people even use glass bottles buried bottom up! I love those paths. I built my patio from rubble we got at the dump and around the neighborhood:

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And here are some paths we made with left over slumpstone, bricks, and rocks:
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It's a lot of labor, but it's fun too. I did one little "cell" at a time as I found material.

If I had your soil and situation, I would also make a three to four foot raised border bed with scrap lumber and fill it in with compost. We are lucky enough to have a mushroom grower nearby who sells used compost very cheaply. You may also be able to get soil or horse manure on Craigslist. Once you have your bed at least six inches above your (wet) streambed, then you will have an easier time growing all of your flowers.

I hate to recommend this, because it does not look like you can get a shovel through that clay, but if you can you should deepen your drainage ditch/stream bed, and curve it around your seating area.

Two other options: plants in pots, and plants on sticks. Both require constant watering. I put my plants on sticks to add height, and use whiskey barrels too:
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Finally, I once got a dead orange tree and stripped it of bark and "planted" it in a bucket of concrete, which I buried. Then I hung bird feeders all over it in every color and shape. It was really fun to sit there and watch the birds. And you can take it with you when you move.

Queerbychoice, if you think the dogs leave a tell-tale trail of plant devastation, you should see what my neighbor's goats have done to my ivy!

Renee

I think a dry streambed would work well in your yard. It would help with drainage, provide a pathway for the dogs to follow that would keep them out of your plants, and would be an interesting focal point for the yard. The soil you would need to excavate to create the stream could be used to form a few berms along the stream, which would provide better draining soil for your plants. If you google "dry stream bed" you will find many attractive pictures for ideas. While the rock and gravel you would need to create one would cost a bit, it would be cheaper than many other projects. Here's a nice picture of one I googled.

Here is a link that might be useful: one nice picture of a dry stream bed

Gobluedjm, the landlady doesn't want to be bothered with fixing anything whatsoever unless it's an immediate emergency (and even then, only grudgingly, often after yelling at us that we ought to just fix things ourselves at our own expense). So unless the flooded yard starts producing toxic mold or something, we're out of luck there.

Renee, your patios and paths are gorgeous! I'm not sure it would make sense to create a work of art like that in a rental, though; I might get halfway done creating it and then move out, and it would just be a bother for the landlady to have to remove so many pieces of rock and bricks that never coalesced into a finished pathway. Or even if I finished it, the landlady might still hate it and find it annoyingly difficult to remove.

Sue and Renee, I'm definitely interested in improving the drainage ditch, including lengthening it, widening it, possibly deepening it (though deepening it is a bit more difficult) and turning it into a dry stream bed. I need some advice about how to do those things, though. Currently, mud tends to gradually fill in the drainage ditch over time, so I have to re-dig it about twice a year. That would need to stop before I could turn it into a dry streambed, or else the rocks would just end up buried under the mud, and it would be ten times as difficult to re-dig with all the rocks in it. I believe Renee has mentioned something in the past about using plants around the edges of a drainage ditch to hold the dirt in place and prevent the mud from filling it in. I'm interested in doing that, but I'm not quite sure where to start. Should the plants go on the walls of the drainage ditch, or on the flat surface right above the drainage ditch? Does it depend on the plant? I'm especially thinking of trying Carex pregracilis there, but I'm not sure whether to put it on the flat surface or on the walls of the ditch.

Currently the drainage ditch is about 12" to 18" deep and 12" to 18" high. It feels like a little bit of a hazard at times, because I've occasionally stepped into it without having realized I was so close to it. I think that making it deeper would make it more dangerous and also more prone to filling with mud, whereas making it wider might make it less dangerous, more useable as a pathway for the dogs, and hopefully less prone to filling with mud. What do you think?

I'm aware that the path should ideally be wider. I'm not looking forward to widening it, though, because to widen the path I have to move the drainage ditch over. The only thing more discouraging than digging a drainage ditch through icky clay is trying to move that drainage ditch later - building the soil back up on one side while removing it from the other side. I already had to move it slightly just to fit the path in at all.

I'm having a hard time imagining how to fit raised beds into my very naturalistic garden design style. Renee, if you were putting a raised bed made from scrap lumber into my yard, where you place it? Sue's suggestion of berms seems more my style, but I'm not terribly sure where I'd want to put the berms, either. The soil is only very slightly sloped upward near the house as a result of my efforts last year to excavate the existing drainage ditch and mound the excess soil along the house. I want to make sure that any additional berms I might put in would not accidentally redirect the water back toward the foundation of the house again.

I don't think I have the dedication to keep plants alive in pots in the summer. I lose too many plants to drought already every summer, even when they're planted directly in the ground. I'm definitely aiming to create the kind of garden where the plants are mostly self-sufficient and, though they might benefit from regular weeding and occasional watering, would not drop dead if I occasionally ignored them for a couple of weeks.

I've really enjoyed seeing all the pics recently of everyone's yards and I'm always especially glad to see people working on their own designs and the many different creative solutions people use. There have been many great pictures in this forum and some beautiful yards this Spring.

If this was my yard, QBC, given my tendencies to use my labor and cheap/free materials, I'd split the yard in two like this:

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Yeah, I'm not getting hired as a landscape architect anytime soon, but the white areas would have all the plants removed to containers, dug down about 12-16" and each side moved en masse shovelful by shovelful to the other side. I would then remediate the soil by mixing it 60% native dirt, 30% completely composted organic matter (I think leaf mold mixes are the best), 10% washed coarse sand and organic fertilizers (blood & bone meals, fish emulsion, ...) and some inorganic iron and phosphorus. Other are better versed in soil science and could give better proportions and additives.

This is maybe weeks of work if you don't get help -- since the soil needs to be moist to be workable, it's heavy. But this allows you to give your compacted soils some tilth, some organic matter for the soil flora to eat and the basic nutrients for under $75 (if you don't need to hire labor to shovel & mix the soil, which needs to be done very thoroughly to avoid dead spots). I'd dump all the native dirt on one side, amend it, then pile it back slightly mounded to about 10-12" tall, then do the other side.

The steps and the purple drainage line I'd set in coarse sand or pea gravel. I'd bury 3" perforated pvc piping in the trench and line the pipe in gravel. Then set your large stepping stones in the sand. I'm not sure of the length of the path/drainage, but I would imagine it wouldn't cost more than $100 or so.

A ton of work, but I lost so many natives here to poor drainage that re-engineering my whole yard was necessary. I kinda think you are in the same situation. Just one rough idea, I know it isn't a style to everyone's taste, but I would hesitate to spend much $$ at a rental property.

Thanks, Dicot - I've really enjoyed seeing the pictures of your garden, and it does seem that you're dealing with a lot of the same problems as me. Including the bermuda grass!

Your suggestions helped a lot - especially the picture, which definitely helped me see where the berms should go. I think I'm going to modify them slightly, in that I don't think it's actually necessary to dig the ground up that much to amend the soil. I ideally need to raise the ground by a foot or so in much of the yard anyway, so I think I can just mix your suggested amendments with the clay I remove by expanding the drainage ditch and pile that mixture on top of the areas I want to raise.